Conquer the Dark

by L. A. Banks

  “Look,” Isda said over his shoulder. “Here’s the deal. We check in at Le Meridien Pyramids. The advance squad already has your room keys, money changed—you’ll find a stash in the safe. I’ll give each man the code to his box. I’ve duct-taped a nine under the inside drawer in your suite. In the back of this van is da heavy shit—RPGs, shells, semi-automatics. We got the holy-water bombs—the case in your room is for more than drinking, got it? All shells are hollow-point, hallowed-earth-packed. You’ve got forty-five minutes to knock the travel dirt off, change into something that can hide a weapon, and be back downstairs in the ground-floor restaurant. We’ll eat for the mortals’ sake, load up on water, then we head out to Giza. Some bull went down near there, I can feel it tweaking me nerves, mon, and I want our locator on it. Cool?”

  The warriors in the van nodded as Celeste shared glances with Aziza, Melissa, and Maggie. It would be so not good to be caught in an Arab country, in Africa, with what, semiautomatics and terrorist-type ammo? She pushed it out of her mind as Isda pulled up to the luxury hotel and she stared at the pyramids that nearly cast a shadow over it.

  “See you in forty-five,” Isda repeated.

  “In forty-five,” Azrael said, pounding Isda’s fist on the way out.

  They hadn’t walked six feet toward the door when one of the brothers from the house handed them their keys. Azrael looked back at the van that pulled off and repeated the number that Isda had zinged to him via telepathy.

  “Forty forty-five.”

  “I got it,” Celeste said, adjusting her purse on her shoulder and then pushing her way through the door.

  Ice-cold air blasted her in the face, so frigid it almost gave her a headache. She glanced around at the opulent lobby, which was filled with European and Asian tourists who had obviously just emerged from the multiple tour buses parked outside. Even after the civil unrest, people clearly still wanted to see Egypt for themselves. The chaos was a blessing; it gave the troupe additional cover to just stroll through the pharaoh-themed lobby.

  Black-lacquered throne chairs, glass tables that had gold pyramid bases, and lotus-flower-print rugs of crimson and gold gave the hotel almost a Vegas level of casino glitz. Gold-painted sphinx statues served as planters for giant palms, elephant grass, and ferns. Even the elevators were outfitted with green, marbled, carved hieroglyphics and scenes of queens and pharaohs gently touching fingertips.

  By the time they arrived at their room down the long corridor, she was slack-jawed. Never in her life had she traveled beyond the Jersey shore, and to think she had to wait until the world was on the verge of Armageddon to see this made her shake her head.

  After Azrael put the key in the door and went in first to do a security sweep, she timidly followed him in and just gaped. Their room faced the actual pyramids. Above a king-size bed with white-on-white, Egyptian-cotton, high-thread-count sheets and a goose-down duvet was a gold papyrus of Nefertiti and King Akhenaton. Black vases filled with ferns stood on either side of the bed night-stands. The bathroom was outfitted with green marble and gold fixtures; a glass shower that had hieroglyphics carved into the wall and a bidet sat beside the weirdest toilet she ever saw. Its strange plunger system was hard to figure out—the purpose of a long metal apparatus by the side of it she couldn’t immediately fathom, and then instead of a handle to flush, a metal lever was in the middle of where the water bowl would normally be.

  Now she understood Azrael’s confusion when he first came to earth. She just stared at the contraption as he flipped on the light, checked behind the shower curtain, then made the rounds deeper into the room.

  A huge flat-screen TV was positioned on the dresser, and gold-and-black satin armchairs that looked like the thrones of Ramses bookended a glass breakfast table. But her attention remained on the window and the pyramids and the small balcony just beyond the table.

  “Is this to your agreement?” Azrael asked, finally dropping her bag and his backpack on the floor by the massive armoire.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this, in all honesty,” she said in a quiet rush. They were supposed to be battling demons … really? Why couldn’t this have been five years ago when all she’d need to bring was a bathing suit, sunscreen, and a good camera?

  “Then you approve?”

  “Very much so.”

  He looked out at the pyramids and then back at her. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she said with a sigh of relief. “You?”

  “Conflicted.” He looked out at the pyramids and then at her again.

  She frowned. “I hope you feel better. Isda said it would pass … whatever this energy adjustment is.”

  “I suspect he is correct.” Azrael picked up his backpack, dropped it twice, and set it on the dresser to begin searching for clean clothes and toiletries. After a moment, still seeming rattled, he headed toward the dresser. “The weapon. I almost—”

  “Yo.” She quickly crossed the room, stepping between him and the drawer and blocking the dresser with her butt. “Why don’t you get a shower, drink some water, and chill out before you mess around and shoot yourself—or me.”

  “Is it that bad … and obvious?”

  She looked up at him with a smile. “Uh, yeah.”

  “Then I guess there’s no need for pretense,” he said in a low rumble, and he bent and kissed her.

  “We only have forty-five minutes,” she whispered into his mouth, lightly biting his bottom lip.

  “Then we shouldn’t tarry,” he murmured, deepening the kiss.

  Pure ambrosia, stronger than it had ever before tasted, covered her palate, making her gasp. Suddenly it felt as if the substance had entered her bloodstream to release every endorphin within her. Moaning into her mouth, he stripped his shirt over his head and then gasped as his wings tore though his back with such force that blood splattered the rug behind him.

  Searing skin met hers as he yanked her light sweater over her head and stripped her pants down her legs, never allowing his mouth to break contact with some part of her body while she kicked out of her shoes. His jeans and sneakers literally disintegrated off him, but the fire he’d lit against her skin was what drew her gasp.

  Hands beneath each lobe of her ass, he lifted her up, taking her mouth, his tongue dueling with hers as he carried her to the bed to deposit her on it like a silent offering. Feathers covered the floor as he knelt at the edge of the duvet, plumes lost from his wings’ violent ejection tumbling across the carpet from the forced air. As he bowed his head between her thighs, she saw just how badly he’d suffered during the flight.

  A rivulet of blood ran down the center of his back, staining his gorgeous plumage crimson where it had emerged from his shoulders. To ease his agony, she found the sweet spot between his wings, her hand stroking it until he threw his head back and cried out, so overwhelmed that tears had risen to consecrate his thick, black lashes.

  But this time as his mouth found her skin, it suckled the Light within her to the surface to leak from her pores in a blue-white wash of energy that covered them both until she feared she’d drown in pleasure.

  He tended to her bud as if he were attending mass, slowly, reverently, and with purpose. Allowing her no escape, his tongue traced each petal and found favor in it, dipping into her until she confessed her pleasure upon escalating cries, his name embedded in the refrain.

  Fisting his locks in both hands, she made him stop and take her breasts and then her mouth, murmuring, “Please,” until he finally heard her prayer. She couldn’t take it, this new intensity of joining with him. Her heart was on the verge of seizure when she took his mouth, tears streaming, and demanded with a deft slide against his pelvis that he enter her.

  He thrust so hard within her that it made her sit up and hug him as one strong arm captured her waist and he flat-palmed the bed for balance. From beneath his tightly closed lids she could see a thin line of neon blue-white light that followed the edges of his dark lashes. He seemed immobilized by pleasu
re for a moment, then something within him gave way as his fist slowly closed on the duvet, and his wings beat the air in time with his thrusts.

  The nightstand lamps fell, furniture moved in increments, and the drapes billowed at the disturbance of the air. The steady drone of his twelve-foot wingspan threatened mirrors, wall art, as he dropped his hold on the bedding to splay his hand against her back as her hair was caught in the maelstrom he created in the room.

  “Cel … este … Oh … Cel … este …”

  He sobbed her name as though calling out for someone lost in the midst of a storm, then returned again and again to her body with hard thrusts as if he were trying to anchor her to him forever.

  Burning, blue-white-charged sweat ran down his chest, over the eight contracting bricks in his abdomen to course over her belly and across her thighs. All she could do was hold on and slip into that pool of Light pleasure so deep that each inhalation sounded like a gasp of a drowning woman, and every exhalation was framed by her deep moan. She could now feel his voice through his shaft inside her as he matched her voice pattern like a revival call and response, every deep-baritone stanza sending shock waves in rings up her canal until she could literally feel the vibration of his voice explode within her womb. That’s when she lost the rhythm and the last vestiges of control as she wept and he rode her harder.

  It had never before been like this; something was different about this time. He bit his lip until it bled, his face was wet from tears, and then he released a subsonic moan that literally put a crack in the television screen and the window behind them. If he hadn’t pressed her against his body as he lifted them a foot above the bed, she might have swallowed her tongue when the first pleasure seizure struck.

  The powerful sensation made her arms and legs go limp as molten heat filled her, climbing up her torso to squeeze her heart. Holding her head in one wide-spread palm and her upper back with the other, he repeatedly convulsed against her, heaving seed and pleasure from his body into hers. Then he dropped.

  They hit the bed with a thud, him bracing himself with his hands at her sides to save her from his full weight. Panting, gulping air, he spoke to her in bursts after a moment, his biceps straining to hold his own weight.

  “Oh, God, Celeste … forgive me, baby. I lost control … I think I might have really messed up.”

  For a moment she couldn’t answer him as reality began to set in. “What if you like really did … and I wind up pregnant? What’s gonna happen? Is that a rule that could get us a lightning bolt?” She peered at him and bit her lip when he closed his eyes.

  “It won’t get you a lightning bolt … me, perhaps.” He tried to smile, but it wasn’t his normally confident one.

  “I don’t guess this is something we can pray about?”

  Again he closed his eyes. “One can always pray for forgiveness … oh, man …”

  “Tell me it’s gonna be all right.”

  He nodded. “It’s gonna be all right.”

  Silence enveloped them as she settled against his stone-hewn chest trying not to panic. All she could do was caress his sides as he wrapped her in his wings.

  Chapter 5

  She looked up at Azrael and then over to the clock that was now turned on its side on the floor. By Isda’s edict, they were supposed to be in the restaurant in fifteen minutes. She so couldn’t deal with any vast cosmic misstep they might have just made. It was too late anyway—and if this was the end of the world, what a way to go out.

  Maybe it was the overall stress or the insane levels of endorphins that now flooded her system, but suddenly she laughed as she held the sides of his face. She closed her eyes as the laughter turned into crying.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No, it’s not, Az,” she said, both laughing and crying. “Oh, my God …”

  “Yeah,” he said, then kissed her forehead, glancing around the partially destroyed room. His serious expression gave way to slow laughter. “Well, at least I feel better. How about you?”

  For a moment she just stared at him as he retracted his wings and rolled off her. He slung a thick forearm over his eyes and sighed as his laughter ebbed. “This is soooo not in the book.”

  “Ya think?” She sat up slowly and glanced around the suite. “We can only hope management hasn’t been called.”

  He sat up slowly. “Well, at least I can fix the room.” He waved an arm and the chairs righted themselves, the cracks in the TV and window vanished, and the clock jumped back up on the table as the pictures on the wall straightened. Azrael glanced up and then looked at his hand.

  “Well, I guess that’s a good sign,” she said, shaking her head and trying to get her hair to fluff down. “Can you fix this while you’re at it?”

  “I was just joking around,” he said nervously. “You’ve never seen me do that. Kill demons, yes. That’s my specialty—but manifesting, moving matter … not so much.”

  The two stared at each other for a moment.

  “That’s a good thing, right?” she said quietly.

  “Given where we are and what we’re supposed to do, one can only hope.”

  Celeste kept her gaze lowered as they rejoined the group in the restaurant. They were a half hour late to the table and her legs were still wobbly. When Azrael muttered a greeting and sat down hard like an unsteady old man, Bath Kol almost spit out his beer. Aziza kicked him under the table. Celeste looked at her sisters sheepishly, and they all glanced back at her with understanding. Just their complicit smiles made her feel better.

  “So, now the gang’s all here,” Isda said in a peevish tone. “At least let the ’oman eat something before we head out to the desert.”

  “I’m not really that hungry,” Celeste said, hoping to avoid any further embarrassment. She could grab an apple or whatever, for all she cared.

  But Isda shook his head. “Your electrolytes are all off and you need some carbs so your sugar doesn’t drop enough to make you pass out. The heat out there ain’t no joke … and if you would be so kind as to hydrate her, Azrael. I do believe I left everybody water in the room.”

  Azrael just nodded and opened a menu. Melissa winked at Celeste and continued grazing on her salad. But Celeste did notice that Paschar was still touching his mate a lot, rubbing her back and sitting well into her seating area. She felt for the poor man. On the other hand, Gavreel was cleaning a plate of hummus and falafel, wiping it with fluffy whole-wheat pita bread. Judging by the litter by his place setting, he was a very peaceful individual now.

  Celeste smiled as she placed her order and listened to Azrael order nearly half the menu. Anything that wasn’t meat was fair game, and he’d already grabbed a roll. All worry about carbs and organic fare had obviously flown out of the window in this land where such luxuries seemed unheard of now. The guys had clearly adopted the policy to go local and clean out their systems later. Even Aziza had to relent. It was that or starve.

  A newly revolutionized Egypt didn’t have chichi organic restaurants, supermarkets, or five-star hotels that could keep up the posture of luxury these days without extreme effort.

  Once the waitress left, Isda released a huff of breath. “Okay, folks, here’s what ground intel has found out so far.” Isda leaned in closer. “The Egyptian Museum is closed, mon. No big surprise about that, right?”

  “What?” Celeste whispered as she glanced around the table.

  “Beyond the protests, low staff levels, and all the hullabaloo, there was a so-called incident there yesterday morning, right about the time you all got on the flight. But they gwan open it up like tomorrow after they mop up and the authorities get done—too much tourist business to be lost … what little is trickling in. Everything is still spotty, you know. Things kinda open when they want to now. There’s no schedule. But they gotta open the main tourist attractions, even if they only got a third of the buses coming in than they did before.”

  “Mop up?” Azrael said quietly, leaning in.r />
  Gavreel stopped eating and leaned in next to him. “Found a body gutted and drained in the storeroom.”

  “Might have something to do with us, might not,” Pas-char said. “But the timing is really suspicious.”

  Bath Kol nodded. “Right now, that poor bastard’s family is catching liquid hell. Because of the way he was killed, nervous authorities are saying Al Qaeda might have turned on him, he could have been a terrorist or in the crime scene here. You know how shit gets spun when there’s no answers and the dark side is involved, bro. Just the way they say he was butchered put that event on my radar.”

  “I definitely felt something weird when we passed the museum,” Celeste admitted quietly. “It was dark.”

  Isda folded his arms over his chest. “Den I say we eat up and get our girl out into the desert.”

  Her body felt like a wet noodle, and after being with Azrael, taking a hot shower, then eating, the last thing she felt like doing was going on a potentially hazardous quest. If she could have curled up into a little ball of humanity and gone to sleep for a couple of hours, she would have been a happy camper. But that just wasn’t in the cards.

  An impromptu ladies’ room meeting when they all hit the lobby was just what her spirit needed. Aziza was the one to sense it first and called for it as only the Queen Mother of the group could.

  “Gentlemen, we will be back,” Aziza announced in a nonnegotiable tone. “The conditions on the road will be spotty at best, I’m sure. And after all this water we’ve forced down, we need to make one last run before getting into the van.”

  Without fanfare or giving the brothers options to protest the delay, she lifted her head and walked in front of the three younger women, who quickly followed. None of them said a word until they’d cleared and shut the outer ladies’ room door. Maggie checked the stalls as though about to do a bank heist. Melissa grabbed Celeste by the arm, and Aziza said a quick prayer to seal the room against bad vibes.